Designs’ exhibition: T-shirt designs seek lower meat consumption

PIFD exhibits work of participants of a workshop held by designer Ammar Belal

LAHORE: Sana Zahid, a third-year fashion design student at the Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design, exhibited t-shirts and badges with stylised chickens printed on them at an exhibition underway at the institute on Friday.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, she said that through her work she wanted to stress the need for lowering meat consumption in the country and for humane breeding conditions for animal and birds raised for human consumption. She said she had also designed entrails and feathers to show the effect of excessive meat consumption.

Zahid said her pet rooster, named Voltaire, was her inspiration for this project titled A Clucking Mess. She had also made a short film documenting the process of chicken breeding and slaughtering.

Maria Munir’s project was based on scents and memory. She said her sister was used to wearing a particular perfume. “She has been married and lives separately now but the smell of that perfume always remind me of her,” she said. She said this had led her to explore how certain scents were inextricably linked to some memories. She said she had identified a particular scent that brought back childhood memories of playing with dolls and trying to feed candies to them. “This led me to digitally print patterns of candies, jellies and tobacco upon a silky and sheer fabric displayed at the exhibition,” she said.

Zubia Zainab’s Ode to Lahore came about after she realised there were so many areas in the city she had never explored. She said that during her explorations she had come across a charpoy weaver and a tabla player and was intrigued by their hand movements. She had started emulating their movements while weaving thread upon frames and handlooms. She had designed a ‘shaluka/salooka’ (an undershirt with zippered pockets sewn onto it) using the technique.

Samra Farman’s project was based on her search for the personality of her late father. She had retraced his likes and dislikes and obtained newspapers from his time to gain a better sense of his personality. This had led her to design fabrics printed with newspaper excerpts and sketches layered on top of one another to show how comprehensive identification of anything was always ambiguous.

Mehak Anwar said she had tried to show that sometimes mistakes could be beautiful. Her work included a design featuring a pair of skeletonised leaves stitched together, inspired by her mother’s hobby of arranging flowers.

The Design Research- An Inquiry into Fashion as Space, Body and Habits exhibition will continue until August 20.

It features work of third-year fashion design students at the PIFD who had attended a workshop organised by Ammar Belal, a professor at Parsons Institute, New York, and designer of his eponymous Pakistani menswear brand.

Speaking to The Tribune, Belal said he wanted to impart to students skills that were not part of the fashion design curricula taught in the country. He said he was also trying to raise funds to establish a scholarship for higher studies in the US.

Belal was facilitated at the workshop by his fellow Parsons faculty member Anke Grundel.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 20^th, 2016.